What It Means to Break a Taboo for 40 Years
(Best Nursing Home, Wellness Awards 2025)
In 1987, the word “nursing home” carried a stigma, and reality didn’t help, as facilities with high standards were rare. The world of senior care existed as a necessity, but not as a choice anyone would make without a weight on their heart. No one wanted to say their parent “went to a nursing home.”
Somewhere in that moment, MAREPI began. Quietly. Steadily.
Nearly four decades later, MAREPI Seniors Care was honored with the award for Best Nursing Home at the Wellness Awards 2025. A distinction that, if you read it carefully, doesn’t simply recognize a good business. It recognizes a philosophy that has stood the test of time.
The conventional logic in business tells us to expand, open new facilities, capture more market. Around 2015, MAREPI decided to do the opposite. Instead of opening new locations, it chose to build on what it had already built. A new renovation, but this time with a different philosophy. Every room with its own identity. Painted ceilings, colorful wallpapers, lighting that bears no resemblance to a clinic. That choice came with cost, risk, and difficult change management at every level.
In care settings, the difference between adequate and genuine is often invisible on paper. Certified nursing staff, medical supervision, renovated facilities. Necessary, but not enough for someone to feel they are in a place of their own.
The difference shows up elsewhere. In whether someone is truly present beside the elderly person, or simply carrying out a task. In whether the person has a day with meaning ahead of them, exercise, creative activities, games, music, dance, events that fill time with joy rather than simply consuming it. These offerings were established gradually and became what defines MAREPI today, because it became clear how much improvement and joy they brought to the daily lives of the people who live there.
These subtle differences cannot be certified with awards. But good awards recognize them.
This award belongs to every person who contributed to that difference. To the team that works behind the scenes every day, without cameras. To three generations of women who built something that didn’t begin as a business but as a duty, and ended up being both. To a community of people who break stereotypes and bring innovation out of words and put it in service of the human being.
This community holds firm even in genuinely difficult circumstances. A prolonged economic crisis, successive changes to the regulatory framework, the enormous challenge of COVID that required new protocols from scratch, in a very short time and for an extended period. In every instance, the response was the same. To stand on our own feet, because we are not protecting only a business, but dozens of people who need stability and safety.
We often hear from people who know MAREPI that what happens there is not “a job” but a calling. It is not something that can be proven with words. You only understand it when you live it.
And we continue. Because even when the lights of recognition fade, there will be dozens of beautiful souls to care for, each carrying an entire life story with them.
